Thursday, 31 October 2013

Reading Benfits and Strategies

Benefits and Main strategies of
Reading

Reading is an essential element
at every stage of one’s life particularly in academic and professional
contexts. Undoubtedly reading is a means of discovering information to expand
one’s knowledge and understanding of the subject of any kind. It is said that
‘reading is to mind what exercise is to the body’. People used to spend some
considerable amount of time for reading in the past since there were no
televisions and computers but now it is no exaggeration to mention one thing
that majority of the people have lost interest and passion to reading and
spending their time for talking on mobile phones,sending SMS, online chatting, social
networking etc. Francis Bacon rightly observed that ‘Reading makes a man complete’.
There is a saying that only good readers are good communicators and therefore,
reading skills should not be ignored by anyone especially the student
community.

Benefits of Reading:Given
below are some of the most important benefits of reading:

Reading
regularly increases the vocabulary.

Reading
can develop positive values and also helps in building confidence in our lives.

Reading
helps us keep our mind focussed on a book or material that we study and it also
increases our ability to concentrate more.

Skimming, Scanning and Intensive
Reading are the three main reading strategies--

Skimming: Skimming
means gathering as much information as possible from a text in the shortest
possible time. We use skimming to quickly gather the most important information
or ‘gist’ from the document without having to read it all in detail. For
example while reading the newspaper we may not read the entire information but
notice only the headlines.

Scanning: Scanning
is a technique for fast reading. It is a way of reading to look for specific
information in a text as quickly as possible. We apply this particular strategy
when we look up a phone number in the telephone directory, searching the
examination result of a student in the newspapers.

Intensive
Reading: Intensive Reading is used in order to extract detailed
information. By using this strategy we understand each word, information or
fact clearly. Student read intensively their academic materials and text books
by paying proper attention.